


A Very Specific Skill Set

by Siria



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 07:35:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18890095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: Natasha doesn't fall in slow motion. Her life doesn't flash before her eyes. There's no time for it, really. The distance between the frantic clasp of Clint's hand and the finality of the ground is nothing at all. It's measured in a heartbeat, in the intake of one last breath, and the thought:this is going to hurt.





	A Very Specific Skill Set

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Sheafrotherdon and Trinityofone for betaing.

Natasha doesn't fall in slow motion. Her life doesn't flash before her eyes. There's no time for it, really. The distance between the frantic clasp of Clint's hand and the finality of the ground is nothing at all. It's measured in a heartbeat, in the intake of one last breath, and the thought: _this is going to hurt_.

It hurts.

It hurts, hurts like her whole body has slammed into cold stone with great force, and then it stings like toppling clumsily into a swimming pool, and then Natasha is coughing up great lungfuls of water. So much water, far more than it seems like the human body should be able to hold. It's as clear and cold as glacial melt. She retches, shakes, struggles to sit up, retches again.

By the time she can stand, Natasha is shaking. The water is cold and she's cold, and the water is an ankle-deep plain that stretches away from her in every direction, level and placid to a horizon so distant that Natasha can barely make it out. Overhead, the sky is a dull, cloudy orange.

It is very, very quiet.

What can she do? She walks. There is nothing else, and she's cold, and she's dead, and at least she doesn't hurt any more. That's something. For whole months of her life, back at the Red Room, she would have counted the simple absence of pain as a victory. Natasha remembers all too well what it felt like to have to run in too-tight heels on a dancer's broken toes. In the Red Room, there'd been very few options: put up with the pain or die. Excel or die. Natasha had always wanted to live.

All these years later, and her options had narrowed even further: put up with the pain and die. All these years later, and the awareness that she's dead is its own kind of odd satisfaction, because the fact that she's dead means that Clint is not. 

Ledger balanced, ledger closed. 

She keeps going.

Neither the landscape around her nor the sky overhead changes. Natasha could almost think she's on some kind of outdoor alien treadmill. Almost, because after a while she realises that she can hear other footsteps in the water: footsteps passing her by, lots of them. They're faster than her, some running, some stumbling, some clearly not bipedal, and there's absolutely no sign of them disturbing the mirror-smooth surface of the water. Natasha can't see anyone at all. There's nothing but the horizon, and the orange sky, and below her, the water.

Below her the water is like glass, reflecting the clouds in the orange sky, but not showing Natasha to herself. She casts no reflection at all, no shadow. Her stomach lurches again.

Panicking won't do her any good. She knows that. It was one of the lessons James was careful to drill into her, back in the day, and anyway Natasha has had practice at this. She's looked at his face and seen no glimmer of recognition there to mirror her own, even after everything.

In the grand scheme of things, this is nothing.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, Natasha's just let herself fall to her death from a clifftop on a world a half dozen galaxies from home in a last-ditch attempt to undo the actions of a narcissistic mass murderer with a dubious grasp of economic theory. Panic isn't going to do her any good, but Natasha thinks she's got one hell of a good excuse for it right now.

She walks and she doesn't get hungry. She walks and she doesn't get tired. She walks and walks under the orange sky and she isn't anything except cold and afraid and aware of the footsteps rushing past her.

It makes her remember survival training with two of the other Widows in her cohort: Irina, the object of envy for once having stolen a whole jar of jam undetected, and Masha, who never could carry a tune no matter how hard she tried. Their handlers had dropped them off somewhere in the Verkhoyansky District in the bitter depths of February with nothing more than a knife each and an order to make it to a settlement.

They were thirteen. They made it back. Irina lost two toes to frostbite and Masha had recurring bronchitis ever after.

But they're dead now—Natasha's dead now—they're all dead now—and maybe half of the whole universe is still dead. She tries to hum Masha's toneless version of "Kalinka" to herself but she can't seem to get her throat to work right.

"You know, there's probably a word for purposefully singing a song you hate to remind you of the dead."

Natasha whirls around to find someone standing behind her—and it's her.

"But you don't need me to tell you that," the other Natasha continues. She is Natasha, but Natasha as she never got to be: straight-backed and silver-haired and smiling, eyes outlined with crows' feet and hands liver-spotted. "Or maybe you do? I'm pretty hazy on the whole spirit guide thing. Much more Thor's area. Remember that story of his about the ravens?"

Natasha clenches her fists—whether to stop them from shaking or to ready herself to fight, even she's not quite sure—but before she can do anything, the other Natasha speaks again.

"And no, I'm not a trick of Thanos, and I'm not an alien wearing your face either."

Natasha forces herself to take a steadying breath. "No offence, but that's exactly the kind of thing that an alien wearing my face would say."

"Hmm. And what about her?" The other Natasha nods her head at something just over Natasha's shoulder, and she turns to see herself again. Herself, but the self Natasha can never quite remember being: six years old and solemn, her curls trying their best to escape from her waist-length braids. Was that what she looked like, right before the Red Room took her? Can this Natasha recall her mother's face?

It turns out that even clenched fists can shake.

The young Natasha cocks her head, as if listening to a distant call, and then skips off through the water. Her feet don't kick up any spray, and she vanishes like she's turned a corner only there's nothing there, just another unbroken expanse that stretches toward the blurry horizon.

"The great thing," the other Natasha says conversationally, from where she's moved to stand next to Natasha's elbow, "is that I don't actually have any real answers for you. I'm you as you would have become, just like she's me as I think I might have been. I'm not a messenger. I'm a side-effect."

Natasha looks up at the roiling orange sky. "I'm inside the Soul Stone."

"That's one way of putting it. Here's another one," the other Natasha says. Natasha looks over at her and sees that she looks even older now: papery skin stretched over a too-visible skull, a grin like a rictus. "It took everything you were and everything you are and everything you could be and now"—the other Natasha shudders, flickers, is seventeen and fifty-one and ninety and Natasha's own exact double all at once—"now all of that is being digested."

And this, Natasha thinks, is probably a good reminder of why you should always read the fine print. After all, what had she thought a primordial lump of awesomely powerful, sentient stone guarded by an undead Nazi wanted with her soul? Nothing good.

"That sounds unpleasant."

"It will be," the other Natasha says. She closes her eyes and shivers, is an old woman once more. "Has been."

Still.

"A soul for a soul," Natasha reminds herself firmly. She'd had to do it, and now she has to hope that it was enough—that Clint got the Soul Stone, and he'd made it back safely to rejoin the others, and that her team has managed to undo every horror that Thanos has caused. She has to trust that it's all been enough and resign herself to the rest. Part of Natasha hopes she'll get to meet her twenty-year-old self before the very end, just to be able to tell her that one day she'll trust people—plural! Americans!—and get to see the look on her own face.

"Natalia Alianovna," the other Natasha snaps, "do you think I'm telling you all this just for the fun of it?" She opens her eyes and glares at Natasha, though surely she can't see her. Her eyes are milky now with cataracts. "We have a very specific skill set, and it would be wonderful if you could remember that y—"

In the space between one breath and the next, she's gone.

"Well, shit," Natasha says.

She's truly alone now. No more footsteps, no more sense of being passed by a rushing stream of invisible people. All Natasha has is herself, in this moment, and a renewed sense of just how cold it is. Maybe if she lies down in the water, it will all be over that much more quickly.

Maybe.

She looks down at the water.

Then again. Then again, she thinks, she'd made it out of the Verkhoyansky District armed with nothing more than a knife and bloody-minded determination. Then again, she thinks, she's a spy. She's wriggled her way out of some pretty tough situations. Maybe few as tough as this, but she had managed to help derail the Tony Stark Self-Destruction Express. That took some doing. She doesn't regret her choice, but it was one she'd made on her own terms. A soul for a soul was what she'd agreed to: her death for one last chance. She'd chosen to jump, not to lie down. She's never chosen to lie down.

There's no going back, Natasha knows that. What's done is done, and it was done for the best. But let the very last part of her dying be the same as the first: deliberate.

Natasha takes a breath.

A very specific skill set, her other self had said. Natasha has been a killer, and the last five years have taught her how to be a leader, but first and foremost she's a spy. She's good at putting on another skin, but she's even better at finding weak spots to exploit.

What are the weak spots of a piece of sentient stone almost as old as the universe? Not money or sex or even power, not the way that humans think of it. Not shame or status or a sense of honour. Natasha turns in a slow circle, keeping her eyes on the distant horizon. She's not sure if it's a trick of the imagination or not, but it seems like there's a storm brewing right at the line where water meets sky: the clouds darkening to a roiling ochre.

If she's being digested, Natasha thinks, then the stone is the thing doing the digesting. That means it has a digestive system—and in any given system, there's a weak spot that Natasha can exploit. Look at what happened in Budapest, after all.

She thinks of the vestiges of all those other souls running past her, in flight from nowhere to nowhere and fading fast. Natasha smiles, and she sits down cross-legged in the water. She tilts her head back and addresses the sky.

"You should know that somewhere out there, a guy called Steve is laughing his ass off at the thought of me saying this," she says. "But I think you're probably overdue for a therapy session."

There's no answer, but Natasha doesn't expect one. She doesn't know if the stones are even capable of understanding human speech, but for her purposes that doesn't matter. What matters is what she feels. What matters is that the Soul Stone wants her scared and panicking and pained. It wants the souls of those whose fathers have betrayed them, whose sisters have left them to bleed out, whose lovers have looked at them with all the love gone from their eyes.

Natasha's been all those things. Now she just smiles.

"Clint let me go, that's true, but I'm here because I want to be. You get that, right? You're chowing down on me because I chose it. I'm not judging particular dietary requirements or anything. I mean, I spent the last few years working with a talking raccoon who's _really_ into tater tots and Sriracha."

Slipping into this tone of voice is easy for her: sugar-sweet to distract while she tests for the best angle to slide the blade home between the ribs. It's more difficult to do it while thinking of everyone she's done this for—everyone who, despite it all, despite herself, she's come to love. Clint and Laura, Cooper and Lila and little Nate; Nick and Maria; Steve and Sam and Rhodey and Tony and Pepper; James and her foolish, secret hope that one day he'll remember her. She keeps their faces in her mind's eye while she talks.

Natasha is doing this for them: truly and absolutely for them. And if she's doing this for them, the Soul Stone isn't going to take that away from her. She chose to jump for the sake of her family, not because she wanted to be consumed. Her pain isn't going to sate anything's hunger, not any more. Let the Stone just try to chew her up, pull her down into its gullet: Natasha's going to make sure she's the worst meal it's ever had. She's going to make sure it _chokes_.

She thinks about how much hitting the ground had hurt, and tells the Stone about the first time that Lila had called her 'Aunt Nat'. She thinks about what it had felt like to fall, and lets the stone feel the tired contentment of sharing a plate of sandwiches with Rhodey after a day spent organising flood defences in Florida. She thinks about seeing herself doubled, aged, and remembers buying Nick a cat print sweater, the very first Christmas gift she'd ever purchased for someone.

Overhead the clouds are massing and there's a low rumbling noise like thunder. The sky seems like it's lowering, like the Stone itself is contracting around her. There are ripples in the water.

Natasha braces herself, and keeps going. She thinks about how she'd known exactly what she was doing when she'd run towards the cliff edge, and laughs at the memory of trying to teach Steve how to do the Cha Cha Slide. She thinks about not wanting any part of the kind of bargain that the Red Skull had made, and lets the Stone know the startled happiness she'd felt the first time she'd realised she'd forged a friendship with another woman at SHIELD. She thinks about how cold the water around her is, and remembers sitting in the back of the quinjet with Sam, both of them punch-drunk with tiredness and giggling at YouTube videos of people falling over.

The sky is falling, is cracking, and the water is rising: covering Natasha's thighs, rising to her belly-button, and she's freezing but she doesn't stop talking. She feels the Stone's distaste and leans into it, burrows into it like a particularly stubborn bit of grit in the sensitive parts of an oyster.

"You want the truth?" she says, channelling Tony's terrible imitation of Nick, laughing and breathless with it and with how much she loves them all, all of them. "You can't handle the truth!"

Beneath her, the ground shakes and Natasha thinks this is it, this is it, it's the very end: let it snuff her out and make it clean. Let her go as herself, buoyed by her memories of family. Instead, everything around her falls apart.

Natasha sits up, coughing and choking on water once again, but now she can feel the weak warmth of Vormir's sun on her face. She's thoroughly exhausted and she aches and she's soaked right through to her skin and she is, improbably, alive.

"No need for the cavalry, huh?"

Natasha looks up to see Steve standing there, his expression wobbling between shock and dry amusement. He's holding Mjolnir in one hand—huh—and Danvers is standing at his elbow, raw power crackling around her clenched fists.

"If you can spare the horses," Natasha says, "Might still appreciate them." Her voice is hoarse from talking so much. She tries to stand but can't quite manage it. She's _alive_. Steve hurries forward and helps her up. Even once she's steady on her feet, Natasha knows he's keeping his free hand near the small of her back, just in case she stumbles.

"You did it?" She has to ask, though she knows there's no way Steve would have come back for her if the team hadn't succeeded.

"Thanos is dead, and the effects of the Snap have been undone," Danvers says. She hitches a shoulder. "Plus Rogers got to roundhouse kick a space Nazi off a cliff. Pretty good week."

"We came as soon as we could, Nat." Steve tells her, brow furrowed, as if she'd think anything else of him. "Clint said… but I couldn't… and then when I was trying to figure out how to put the stone back..."

"I'm not saying you shouldn't have kicked the undead Nazi off the cliff," Danvers says. "Just maybe you should have done it after asking him what to do."

Steve rolls his eyes extravagantly in a way that seems to sum up perfectly the whole day Natasha's been—

"Wait, she said _week_?" Natasha would have sworn that no more than a few hours had passed. "I've been dead a week?"

"We—"

"You two ready to head back?" Danvers apparently has a low tolerance for small talk, and an even lower threshold for what she considers to be small talk. She nods her head towards where one of the quinjets sits waiting.

"First things first," Natasha says, and she turns and hugs Steve hard enough that he gives a little _oof_ of surprise, drops Mjolnir, and folds himself around her to hug her back.

There's more than one way to give a soul for a soul. Natasha prefers this one.


End file.
